In Schwitzgebel
(2015) I argued that the United States, considered as a concrete entity with
people as some or all of its parts, meets all plausible materialistic criteria
for consciousness. Kammerer (2015) defends materialism against this seemingly
unintuitive conclusion by means of an "anti-nesting principle"
according to which group entities cannot be literally phenomenally conscious if
they contain phenomenally conscious subparts (such as people) who stand in a
certain type of functional relation to the group as a whole. I raise three
concerns about Kammerer's view. First, it's not clear that it excludes the
literal phenomenal consciousness of actually existing groups of people, as one
might hope such a principle would do. Second, Kammerer's principle appears to
make the literal phenomenal consciousness of a group depend in an unintuitive
way on internal structural details of individuals within the group. Third, the
principle appears to be ad hoc.